Berlin report

Geoff Andrew sees new films from Robert De Niro, Hal Hartley and Park Chan-Wook at the German film festival.

Feb 16 2007

It's hardly surprising that cinema – the first art form capable not only of suggesting but actually embodying duration – should be somewhat preoccupied with time's passing, but this year's Berlin Film Festival has seemed at times unusually obsessed by history. Not just by past events but by questions of how we recall, depict and interpret those events and their influence on the present. This concern manifested itself in various ways in Berlin, but in terms of the films seen by this writer, it was – ironically, perhaps, given the current administration – the filmmakers of the USA who dealt most explicitly with the legacy of earlier years. Big names like Eastwood, Soderbergh and De Niro, indies like Hal Hartley, or unknowns making a first foray into documentary.

My colleague Dave Calhoun has already written of 'The Good German', Steven Soderbergh's enormously ambitious if finally flawed account of the ethical turmoil to be found in Berlin immediately after the War. Small wonder this canny, brave American auteur was looking forward to a European premiere in that same city. Another take on WW2 was Clint's extremely fine 'Letters from Iwo Jima', which as part of a diptych with 'Flags of Our Fathers' constitutes one of the most remarkable achievements to emerge from Hollywood in recent years. But then Clint was always a maverick, happy to make – in his own quiet way – movies few other studio directors would even dream of.

That points up the distinctly limited achievement of Robert De Niro's belated second outing as director, 'The Good Shepherd', a spy saga which chronicles the soul-freezing career of preppy Matt Damon to suggest the compromising of US ideals in the OSS/CIA from the comparatively idealistic 1930s to the more transparently exploitative 1960s and thereafter. The PC message may be fine, the clumsy, cliché-ridden execution less so; for a fuller review of this portentous, ponderous, deeply predictable film, check back to the site next week.

A few documentaries dealt with the history and politics of the USA rather more satisfyingly. Dave Calhoun, again, mentioned 'A Walk into the Sea', a wholly fascinating account of one man's tragic encounter with the Factory. The twentieth anniversary of Andy Warhol's death also brought us 'Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film', a four-hour Ric Burns special marked by the usual public broadcasting tropes: terrific access to archive footage, careful research, but also needlessly wall-to-wall music and a dissent-free insistence on Warhol's significance that verges on the hagiographic. I preferred the cheaper, more incisive and ambiguous 'Walk…' – for me, maybe, the Festival's most fully rewarding film - just as I liked 'Strange Culture', an intriguing if flawed doc about an activist/artist facing terrorist charges after his wife died unexpectedly just as the couple were involved in a project about bacteria and GM foods. Scarily relevant and blessed with a charismatically defiant victim-protagonist, the film nevertheless suffers from a one-sided narrative (necessarily so, as the case is still sub iudice) and stilted docudrama recreations starring Thomas Jay Ryan (okay) and Tilda Swinton (stiff).

Hal Hartley's 'Fay Grim' – a belated sequel to 'Henry Fool' – deals with similar issues, positing a past for the fictional scumbag hero of the earlier film that embraces Latin America and Afghanistan; but while the film has its moments (it's funnier and far less wooden than the unreleased 'No Such Thing' and 'The Girl from Monday'), it's still a far cry from Hartley's heyday. There are good gags, attractive turns from Jeff Goldblum and the aforementioned Ryan, and an always eye-catching lead in Parker Posey, but it never fulfils his early promise; it's too long by far, not to say a little smug and – dare one say – hard to follow. Still, it's way better than 'When a Man Falls in the Forest', second feature of one Ryan Eslinger, starring Sharon Stone (also exec-producing, whatever that means), Tim Hutton and – as a lonely geek, natch – Dylan Baker. The less said about this decidedly 'quirky' melodrama of dystopian eccentricity, the better.

Away from the US, things were not noticeably better. Fans of Park Chan-Wook's 'Vengeance' trilogy (I'm not) may feel let down by his tedious 'I Am a Cyborg But That's OK', a fanciful, feeble sci-fi psychodrama that finds mental illness inexplicably amusing – except that the jokes aren't funny anyway. André Techiné's 'The Witnesses' is basically superior soap that lets him reconsider the consequences of AIDS' appearance in 1984. It's engrossing in a fairly unremarkable way, but blessed with lovely performances from Emmanuelle Béart, Michel Blanc, Sami Bouajila et al. It also boasts the same virtues as Pascale Ferran's 'Lady Chatterley', a very decent Lawrence adaptation which has perfect leads, impressive sex scenes, and a sensible understatement that never attempts a cinematic equation for the novelist's purple prose. It's just a pity it's about half an hour too long.

From Argentina, the in many ways impressive 'La Léon' proved too low-key a study of local rivalries despite fabulous black and white Scope camerawork, while 'Takva' was an intriguing, often amusing fable about a lowly Turkish dogsbody promoted by Imams to a job that leads to sinful capitalistic excess. One particularly sharp cut from scenes of tantric devotion to carnal knowledge is very pleasingly subversive. Perhaps the most enjoyable surprise, however, was 'Tuya's Marriage', by China's Wang Quan'an, a stirring, bold, pacy drama about a Mongolian woman – a good shepherd, indeed – trying to make ends meet despite the hindrance of a crippled husband, too many suitors and a wayward son. It drifts occasionally into implausible melodrama but mainly succeeds as a superior and succinct fable about loyalty, trust and independence. De Niro would have done well to see this film before submitting the 167 minutes of his own lumbering movie.

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